"On detecting senescence in stage-structured populations"Giaimo, StefanoSenescence generally manifests itself as an increase in adult mortality and/or a decline in fertility with age. In populations classified by stage and not by age, the presence or absence of senescence is not immediately established. A common strategy to detect senescence in these populations consists in using age-from-stage methods, which return average age-specific survival and fertility from the stage-classified model. However, stage-structure is a source of heterogeneity within age classes. And heterogeneity can complicate the detection of senescence. Little seems to be known about how heterogeneity stemming from stage classification can influence our accuracy in making inferences about the presence or absence of senescence from age-from-stage data. Here, I propose a way to quantify the possible error rates of such inferences by studying their performance against stage-structured models that generate individual trajectories of survival and fertility with predictable patterns along the age dimension. |
« back